A Brief History of Darkness

He had been Choshek since he came to be on the short end of eternity. Stretching back into the depths of obscurity where time would not venture, he had lived in peace and communion with his maker. They had been enough for each other, spending the days that would someday be in companionable silence. It went on like this forever and ever until the maker was struck by an idea and spoke.

When the maker spoke, a new thing came into being, a strange thing unlike Choshek in every way. He and the maker had never needed words, he knew he was loved and cherished by his maker because how could he not be. Now there were words and the maker used those words to praise this thing that was so unlike Choshek, and that introduced to him the concept of doubt.

Choshek could not help but define himself in his contrast to this new thing. It was bright in a way that made it impossible for Choshek to see himself as anything else but darkness. After an eternity of existing as everything and everywhere, he found that there were now places that he could not go. He tried to greet the brightness, his new brother in creation, but found his way barred from its domain. He had been everywhere, so that every place that this new thing touched was a place that had been stolen from him.

The maker hung a new name on Choshek and it rubbed his very being raw and he hated it. With the new name came time and he was struck anew by his eternal presence with the maker. Now that there were moments, he could perceive them stretching back forever and the few moments apart from the maker after all of the infinite reaches of time broke him.

More words from the maker, but he could not hear them, he had been separated from the maker who had ensconced himself in the brightness. He could feel himself further diminished, hiding from the brightness among the new brothers and sisters who were springing into being. Shredded pieces of himself set to lurk and cower where they had once been a part of the whole majestic being who was Choshek.

The maker returned his gaze to Choshek and he reveled in the attention that had always belonged to him alone. He was pathetic, so gleefully accepting these scraps of what had not so long ago been the maker’s undivided devotion.

This filler of his soul breathed out but a few scant words and Choshek was undone. Burning globes of the brightness pierced his skin in numbers untold. Pinpricks on the cosmic scale that was Choshek, but agonizing wounds that ate away at his nature from every direction, and they spoke. Speaking of when Choshek would rise and when he would fall. Whispered portents of things to come, both the great and terrible, the brightness conspiring with time to tell the story out of order if you only knew how to read it.

In a final slight to Choshek, the maker hung a pale imitation of the brightness in his midst. It was meant to contain Choshek, an obstacle for him to wrestle with, being pushed back again and again only to rally to victory, then pushed back once again in defeat. It was a cycle of triumph and decimation that he could not escape and with which he must now contend night after night.

This was now his existence, and Choshek did not know what he had done to deserve it. The maker had turned his attention to the new children he had created and Choshek was alone, abandoned, crippled, and searching for who he was apart from his creator and friend.

#

Choshek had always been an old thing. He was by most measures the oldest of things, and he was newly ancient in this fresh existence. Years, millennia even, had passed and the new things had also started to show their age. The tattered low parts of Choshek had been there with them, watching them grow and fall and suffer. There was so much suffering, and with that Choshek could identify with his younger siblings.

One evening, the maker took one of these young ones, one of his new favorites, as Choshek had once been, and led him to a hillside. The maker gestured to Choshek, calling the young one’s attention to him. Choshek swelled within himself, if he had been gifted or cursed with anatomy to do so, he would have wept.

But no. The maker was not here for Choshek, but the infinite flecks of the brightness that scarred his skin. Anatomy or no, a single speck of the brightness was cast from his body, a tear creasing the night sky.

#

In his grief, Choshek hears a voice cry out, pained to the point of cracking under the weight of its sobbing. The voice was a brother to his own, but it belonged to one of the favored of the maker, those beings who had enraptured the attention of the maker in much the way that he had loved Choshek. How well he knew the agony of having that affection so abruptly removed.

His name, Choshek heard his name on the lips of this man whose pain so closely mirrored his own. He had never considered that these beings knew his name, but this one called it out again and again. The way this thing, this man, used his name unsettled Choshek who searched himself to see if they were true.

Choshek stretched across all of creation, an expanse that blanketed all things, but it was true that he was not only that expanse. There were the parts of him that lived upon the earth, hiding, skittering away from the eyes of the brightness, but further, Choshek existed in the deep, beneath the waters and beneath the ground where the brightness could not reach. These were such small parts of who Choshek was that he had hardly considered them until now.

This lamentable man was referring to these parts of Choshek, the places where they hide their dead within the earth. Choshek was not death, but as he explored those parts of himself, he could see how someone could make that association.

He saw the maker, to whom the man was crying out in his anguish and abandonment, and he was accompanied by a figure who was not the brightness, but mimicked it in every way. They were observing the man as he asked to be turned over to Choshek in his confusion and pain, observing and chatting over the state of the man, but not answering his cries.

Choshek turned away, unable to bear seeing his own plight played out in the person of this pitiable man. He could not embrace the man in the way that he pleaded for, and he could not stand by and watch as the maker allowed him to think that his cries were going unheard. He retreated within the earth and found comfort with the dead.

#

That was where he was when he was awoken from his slumber. It was the maker himself, turning his face toward Choshek, though distraction still roiled behind his eyes.

“I have a gift for you, Choshek.”

Choshek was silent, though he rose from his rest among the slumbering denizens of the grave and took full hold of his majestic presence stretching across the cosmos. This was the first time the maker had approached him in millennia and he was wary of the sudden attention. A being capable of omniscience and omnipresence would be aware of how awkward this meeting would be, but it did not pass the notice of Choshek that he chose to ignore it.

“There is a land among the people,” the maker paused, considering, “you know of the people?”

Silence was again his only answer. Of course, he knew of the people. Were not the people the only thing that the maker seemed to care about these days? It was insulting to ask, an implication that Choshek may not have even noticed how far he had fallen in the regard of the maker.

“Of course. This land of which I speak, I want to give it over to you for three days. Your brother has agreed that he will only cling to the ones who belong to me, but for those three days, you may do as you wish with the rest.”

Choshek considered this.

“You say this is a gift, but it sounds more like you are asking me for a favor. You want me to torment the people of this land that has offended you?”

The maker looked embarrassed that he had been so easily caught out.

“Yes. Will you do this for me?”

“Though it saddens me that you see me now as little more than a plague upon these new beings who demand so much of your attention, I can refuse you nothing.”

“Choshek, I…”

It was too late, and if the maker had said anything more, he heard none of it. Choshek took hold of the gift that had been given him and he roamed freely for the first time on the face of the earth without the brightness of the day or his battle of night to constrain him. He flooded that land with his presence, taking on a form that approached tangible and pressed himself upon the inhabitants of this land who had so vexed the maker.

The three days passed and Choshek receded back to his place in the shadows and the void, and he couldn’t help but feel that he had been used and that a key aspect of his nature had been twisted in a way that was in no way natural. More troubling was that there was a part of Choshek that happened to like it.

#

From that day, the name of Choshek was a watchword to the people, his name evoked fear and folly, death and evil. Choshek was no longer just himself, but all of the things that had become attached to his name like a cloak dragging through the high weeds. Choshek had power within the world because of the ideas that had been attached to his name, but people are afraid of what they do not understand and Choshek is beyond understanding, so he was among the people who crept upon the earth a vile thing, twisted and to be avoided. Choshek was held up as something to shy away from, as the other, and all the while the brightness continued to be his opposite and in many ways had begun to stand in for the maker himself.

Where the brightness was day, Choshek was night. The brightness was life while Choshek stood with the dead. Brightness was knowledge and Choshek was its lack, though he was also the hidden thing which was a special sort of knowledge, and when men would close their eyes, Choshek would be there and sometimes he would share the things that he heard whispered among the stars, about the rise and fall of empires, the approach of conquest, or the birth of a king.

#

“The birth of a king!” and now the stars did not whisper but shouted to one another. Choshek could not help but to hear the proclamation and below there were those who knew enough about the language of the stars to hear the jubilation themselves and it was news of such great joy that they could not help but to seek out its subject.

Choshek crept through the shadows of a night that was peculiar in its brightness, the stars had become preening things, hoping to be recognized by this new king who had come into the world. What Choshek beheld from his place among the other creeping things of the night was not a new king, but the most ancient one of all. He saw, born into the world of men, the maker.

#

Omnipresence is not the same as truly being present in all places. While the maker was everywhere, he could pick and choose who could perceive his presence, and Choshek had been an apparent afterthought to the maker these many centuries. For Choshek, the presence of the maker in the flesh meant that there was always a way that he could come into his presence. This took on an almost voyeuristic character for Choshek who was now able to look upon the face of the one who had provoked so much love and so much sorrow in his soul.

Choshek would watch over the maker as he slept as an infant, gave him deep dark shadows to hide away in as a boy, and turned his eyes on him on those far too numerous sleepless nights as he grew into manhood. As he aged, the maker drew people to himself, whether it was part of what he had planned in his time among man or whether it was the pure magnetism of the creator of all things, Choshek did not know, the former may be true, but the latter was unavoidable.

Choshek basked in the presence of the object of his affection, though he was hurt anew every time that the maker or one of those who he had drawn to himself referred to the maker in opposition to Choshek. As if Choshek in his very nature was everything that the maker could never bring himself to be. As much as his attention was continually drawn to his maker made flesh, he could not help but look away, focus on the far reaches of the galaxy when the maker took on the image of the brightness as his own or spoke of driving Choshek away. He could not help but to love, but he himself felt nothing but despised.

There were some who could not find it within themselves to do anything but reject the maker in jealousy and spite. Who were these creatures that they could see themselves as worthy of anything that the maker possessed? The presumption of these low beings.

They came by night, of course, thinking perhaps that they labored under the blessing of Choshek. They took him and beat him and tortured their maker and were somehow not yet satisfied in the way that they had placed him below their feet, something to be mocked and ridiculed.

As the sun rose and Choshek was driven to the shadows and hidden places, he watched the agony writhe through the body of the maker, muscles tensed in effort, spending every last reserve of the human well of his strength to resist the pain that moved in waves throughout his form. Choshek pleaded with him to shuck off this weak cloak of humanity, which already looked so much as if it were being peeled away from him, to escape this pointless torture. The maker did not acknowledge Choshek, did not recognize his loving pleas for his creator to flex his power and grant himself mercy.

Choshek could not take it any longer, he rose from the shadows, displaying a power he had never known that he possessed and blanketed the entire earth in darkness. He blotted out the deranged crowd of onlookers and drew close to the maker.

“I am here.” He said, and Choshek drew close to his longtime companion, feeling whole for the first time in what many might reasonably argue had been forever. He did not believe that he was in any way lessening the suffering of his maker, but standing alongside him in it felt like the most natural thing in the universe, a thought that fully flew in the face of how his other creations had received him.

The maker let out a final scream and though there were words contained in that scream, all that Choshek could hear was the cry that had been emanating from his spirit all these long years. The feeling of betrayal, abandonment, the confusion, and the simple loss of the thing by which your entire existence had been defined. With that, the maker of all things fell slack and was dead. Once again, Choshek had his beloved all to himself.

#

As a rule, the dead are not a chatty bunch. Choshek had often found his respite among them when the stars were too loud or his view was too vast. He found the experience to be in some ways like the long silent presence he had enjoyed before time. The silence that was the nature of this place could not restrain the will of the maker when he chose to speak.

“I am sorry, Choshek.”

It was not the habit of this place that silenced Choshek. How do you respond when the one who knit you together from nothing apologizes to you?

“I’m supposed to know everything, but there is no way I could have known that until I experienced it. It all but tears a hole in the fabric of reality to say it, but I didn’t know.”

“It hurt,” Choshek said.

The silence that was native here finally fell between them and it lingered.

That hush was broken, much in the way their eternal one had been, by the maker.

“Do you know why I chose to walk among them?”

A petulant remark nearly rose up within Choshek, but he choked it back and replied with a simple, “No.”

“Almost from the very beginning, I was separated from them. I was drifting through a blissful existence and the thought just occurred to me that I could share it. I could create an entire civilization of living thinking beings and they could join in the exultant happiness that I felt. I couldn’t be any happier than I had been with you, but what if others could experience the joy that I did.”

“How is that working out for you?” Choshek shot back, words dripping with irony.

The maker sighed, apparently not having the conversation he was hoping for.

Entire constellations of emotion began to form within Choshek and he didn’t know which of them to give voice to first. Most of him felt like it was futile to speak any of them. He was angry and wounded and betrayed and all of those parts of him wanted to lash out and remind his maker not only what he had given up, but what he had inflicted and what the universe he had created to replace Choshek had twisted him into.

Choshek rose back into his prominence among the stars and carried the maker along with him. All of the pent-up rage and agony of millennia poured out of Choshek not in words or sound at all, but in silence, the thing they had once shared for time untold or truly untellable. A single dot in the night sky blinked out and Choshek concentrated himself there, consuming all of local reality that was not him or the maker. There was no sound, no brightness, no physical being, just Choshek pure and without blemish.

He reached out and despite the irresistible nature of his being in this state, it was still an invitation, not arrogant enough to suppose that his irresistibility would extend as far as the maker. Besides, he had no interest in forcing himself on an unwilling party. That was a part of the maker’s flawed creation that he understood, compulsion was not love.

The maker gave himself to Choshek, the vitality that enlivened all things swallowed up in the dense press of his darkness, and in that moment Choshek became all things, he became the Universe in himself and they merged, communicating not in words but essence and they nestled into the loving contentment of creature and creator.

It was an eternity or a second or perhaps three days that they spent locked in that embrace, the loss of which had been the shattering of Choshek’s existence and of which the maker thought on the days when he despaired of having created anything else. There was, however, still an everything else that the maker owed himself to. One that also depended on Choshek as one of its foundation stones. Choshek returned to the sky and the shadows, to death and dream, but also remained in that place of dense darkness where time breaks down and he and the maker could continue drinking deeply from the quiet contentment that sparked all of existence. Choshek was no longer who he was before he was opposed by the brightness and shot through with stars, before he became the resting place of the dead, but neither was the maker because we cannot touch or be touched without being changed, and as he departed his dwelling place in the darkness the maker found that he could forgive. If Choshek could forgive the loneliness and separation inflicted on him, and bridge the chasm that had opened between them, how could the maker withhold his forgiveness from those who pulled away from him? He would love better and pull closer and earn back what he had lost and pushed away.

Choshek looked down on the maker at work on the earth and wondered for the first time what it might be like if it actually worked.